by Mia Miller
“What did it mean that first day, when Scott said I didn’t look like your type, when we first met?” I asked when we were in my hallway.
He snickered.
“Scott and I had just shared pictures of our exes,” he said, making me flinch. “Nothing bad, just, you know, what they looked like. He had commented how all of my exes looked like they were too ‘good.’ Which they weren’t, trust me—” He must have seen my expression because he stopped short, paused, and then backtracked. “Not that you look like a bad girl, just the colored hair, and the baggy clothes, and the different makeup, you’re . . . you’re a good surprise, Dellie,” he finished his explanation, pulling my hand to his mouth and giving the tips of my fingers a stealthy kiss.
“Fine.” I grinned. “I’ll take it, but only because I like surprises.”
He smiled and kissed my forehead.
“Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing the old black curls reappear,” he told me, and I scrunched my nose. I hadn’t worn my hair natural in a couple of years. I wasn’t sure it remembered how to be itself.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said as he placed a small kiss on my forehead in response.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?” I grinned.
“Why did you act like a scaredy-cat the first few times we met?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Dellie . . .”
“Fine,” I acquiesced on a long exhale. “I was acting like a scaredy-cat because I was scared, simple as that.”
“Scared?” He cocked an eyebrow as something I couldn’t place made its way onto his beautiful features.
“Yeah.”
“Why would be scared of me?”
“I wasn’t scared of you, really. I was scared of rejection,” I said, letting it all out like ripping a Band-Aid. “I thought you pretended not to know me on account of being . . .”
His head tilted to the side as he watched me, waiting for me to finish.
“Fat.”
“Jesus. Get that out of your head.” His tone, which was adamant but gentle, covered my objections. His hands settled on my waist.
“You’re perfectly beautiful. Your every curve is perfection.”
“Pssssh, I thought perfection and beauty didn’t necessarily coexist,” I teased him.
“Don’t be a smartass, Dellie.”
His fingers grazed my sides in sinewy paths. His mouth touched butterflies kisses to my neck, and he was suddenly on his knees before I ever knew what was going on. “You’re feminine,” he said, touching a chaste kiss to my stomach. “You’re soft.” He went on, touching another one to the inside of my arm, tickling me and making me lose any remainder of composure. Sensation exploded everywhere he touched me, but he didn’t seem to notice as he went on in his almost reverent exploration of my clothed body. His fingers splayed over my body everywhere, making tiny circles as his lips slowly made their way back up to my lips.
“You are perfect, and I will show you just how much I think it as often as you will let me.”
Chapter Eleven
Delia
Now
“Oh my gosh, I freaking love this. What do you call it?” I asked Dalton, who looked as superb and as different as always. “I swear, anything you put on, you can pull off!” I grinned at him. The guy looked like a fashion student more than a film student one most days.
“What, the manket?” He teased. “Ha! It’s just a shawl, gorgeous. What are you doing, trying to match the fire in your man candy’s hair?” he asked, pointing to the red and orange streaks I’d added to my curls, which I had taken to wearing again after Oscar’s request.
“Hardly. You know I love color.”
“That you do. When is Anton getting here?”
I looked at my watch. It had only been five minutes since Dalton had asked me last, but I was good-natured about it.
“He should be here soon.” I would have thought that since we were in Anton’s studio, he would have been here early, but that wasn’t the case. We needed him. Since Dalton and I were opting for a joint project, each of us would need a tutor’s sign-off on the project in order to actually receive credit for it against our final grades. We’d earned the heart of Dalton’s tutor, The Head of Mixed Arts Department, and now we just needed my eccentric teacher’s go.
“I just hope they will be as excited about this as we are.” I nudged aside a pallet and rested my hip against the desk. The studio was a chaotic mess of projects in different levels of completion, and there was no way I was touching anything just so I could find a seat.
“The title of our project is called “My Body, My Own,” and the idea behind it is volunteering information about our wounds to teach others,” Dalton explained.
“Teach them what?” Anton asked as he set his bag on the floor by the door.
“That they’re not alone, mostly. That there are others who can help. But the first step is to say something.
“And the second part of our message is that maybe silence is not the answer to healing. Maybe once we have background and input on what is happening around us, we can help reduce the amount of wounds we inflict on those around us. Willingly or unwillingly.”
“I’ve already bit the philosophy behind it,” Anton said. “Now, explain to me about the media you plan to use.”
Dalton and I grinned at each other and opened our files. We had a lot of things to go through.
***
By the time I left, I was running late for another workshop, and I still had to catch the subway. I bolted down the steps and out of the main exit without so much as looking up from my phone. Being in a rush is the only excuse I have for not noticing Oscar before we nearly collided on the sidewalk.
Socked in a way that only almost being knocked over in public can accomplish, I turned to him, taking him in. He had on a jogging outfit and a wind jacket, and was looking at me as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Hey, you,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He exhaled quick breaths, pointing to his most obvious activity with a grin on his face. It was funny, but I realized I’d forgotten what his eyes looked like in the full light of day. They seemed somewhat different.
“I could ask you the same,” he said, his voice sounding rough. Cautious.
“I told you I was coming here to see Anton this morning, remember?” I told him and his body stood completely still for a second. It was almost so quick that I would have missed it had I not been watching him so closely. Something was different.
“Right,” he said. “Do you want to grab a coffee?”
“I can’t. I’m running late to class,” I told him even though he knew my schedule almost as well as I did.
“Please, Delia, let me buy you coffee,” he said softly.
“I guess I can get the notes from one of my classmates,” I caved, letting him lead me to a coffee cart a block away. “What are you doing here anyway?”
He shrugged, his eyes shadowed by something I didn’t place.
“This Anton guy? He treating you well?” he asked, changing the subject to something even more peculiar. This Anton guy? Had he not been paying attention when I told him about the fiasco of my first class?
“Yeah, I guess. It turns out last week’s tough guy who demanded blood was just an act to get respect from us.”
He made a small sound of agreement, and when I glanced at him, his eyes were busy roaming over me—my lips, my hands, my figure, and I felt them everywhere, like a new and strange touch.
“Stop, you’re making me blush,” I told him, and he grinned.
“What do you want to drink?” he asked, and I gave my order to the vendor. After paying, he gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“Enjoy your vanilla latte, beautiful. I need to run.”
“But . . .”
“I’m sorry, Delia,” he spoke with a hint of urgency. “I need to run now.”
It was all I got before he turned and headed in the direction we just came from.
&n
bsp; ***
That weird behavior coupled with complete radio silence during the following hours didn’t help my nerves at all. By the time I’d gotten back to Brittany Hall it was already night and my mood had gone from grouchy to ugly.
Me: Hi, where are you?
Oscar: Common room upstairs.
Please be alone. Please be alone.
I chanted while the elevator took me to the top of the building. When I saw that, he was alone, I sighed with relief.
Too bad it was short lived. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was in a bad mood. His scrutiny dissolved my resolve in a heartbeat.
“What did you do today?” he asked in lieu of hello.
I stopped smack in the middle of the room, my fists propped on my hips.
“Hi, Red. That’s funny since you know what I did today.”
“Humor me,” he said dryly, getting up from his chair and stalking to me.
I let my shoulders sag into a sigh.
“Dalton and I got the okay from Anton for our project. Then you got me the coffee in Greenwich, then I went to the second part of history, and . . .”
I couldn’t finish. Oscar’s hands were on me, and with a tortured sound that sang almost like a wail, he grabbed my face and kissed me.
“I’m still upset you didn’t say a thing all day,” I gave him and he repeated that sound again, seeking even more closeness.
His kiss barely left me room for breathing but, through fuzzy thoughts, I melted into his arms, anything else forgotten.
There were worse ways to die than smothered in the arms of a handsome man who ached for you.
***
It was two days later that I had another surprise. I was headed to the Silver Building and had just hung up with my mom when I saw Oscar’s gorgeous frame coming at me through the crowd. His smile blinded me from a distance, and I waved, shoving away the confusion as to why he was here instead of at rehearsal with Corbin.
“Um, hi, Red,” I said, and his eyes lit up when he pulled me into his arms. “I didn’t think I see you until tonight.”
“Hi,” he said roughly and spun me around like I barely weighed a thing. “I just needed to see you for a bit.”
“Okay,” I said encouragingly. “Well, here I am.”
He set my feet back onto the ground. “I’m going to do something, okay?”
After I nodded, he leaned closer, whispering, “Close your eyes.”
I closed my eyes and felt him a breath away, leaning in and placing a whispered kiss on my lips. I pressed closer to him, but his touch was so tentative that I could barely feel it. He sighed and touched his forehead to mine.
“I can’t do this.” The words were so soft I wasn’t even sure I heard him right.
Then he was gone, and my lips tasted bitter and spicy.
***
I’d fallen asleep on top of a drawing. When my phone rang, I transferred a good part of the graphite from my face to the phone, but I could wake myself up enough to care.
“Hi, Chameleon,” Oscar’s voice sounded in my speaker, tired but clear.
“Hey.” The single word was slow and heavy with sleep, which wasn’t surprising considering it was two in the morning. “How did your rehearsal go?”
“It was good,” he told me. “We played our two new songs and I think they’re ready for an audience. I wish you’d been there.”
“I won’t miss the next one, I promise. I just had a lot of catching up to do.”
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“Nah,” I lied. “I was still working.”
“You should catch some sleep. We will be a while longer because Micky asked us to entertain for more hours. He even offered payment for tonight’s performance, because he said we were that good. I just called to say that I’m sorry we had a day without a kiss,” he said in a sweet tone.
“The weird one this morning still counts.”
“Say again?” he asked abruptly. I was probably imagining things, because his voice sounded changed.
Figuring he couldn’t hear me over the background noise, I repeated myself. “I said that the one this morning still counts, but you need to make it up to me for leaving without a word.”
“I said that the one this morning still counts, but you need to make it up to me for leaving without a word.”
There was a long, pregnant silence between us, and I rolled over, taking the phone with me.
“Delia, I think we need to talk.” His voice sounded tight, as if he was caging something I didn’t understand.
“About what?”
“Not like this, face to face,” he responded, talking fast. “I need to go.”
“Okay, but—”
“Tomorrow, Dellie.”
I watched my phone, feeling a bit dumbfounded as I typed out a text to him.
Me: Good night, Dr. Jekyll. Or is it Mr. Hyde?
I sent him an extra line of a smiley face to make sure he didn’t get upset over my joke, which I found totally warranted given the circumstances.
I fell asleep without a response.
***
“Fffs, this place hasn’t changed at all,” Corbin said as he walked in, drawing all the eyes in the room to him. I was in the dance studio at the top floor in Brittany’s when he arrived with Enzo. Kayla had been rehearsing her routine for an hour while I’d been sitting in the corner, alternating between watching her and torturing the pages of a brand new notebook.
It was something I did a lot when I was flustered. I sketched, and I stabbed the paper with my graphite because I hated what I was doing. I needed to draw to calm my nerves, but when I was unnerved, I couldn’t draw. It was surely the tenth circle of hell. Oscar seemed to be playing a cold-and-warm game this past week that I didn’t really care for. He switched moods from grumpy and sad faster than lightning. When I asked him about it, he would only say that it wasn’t me. How could it be anything else? I had no idea, and a girl could only take so much uncertainty. I was scratching away at what felt like my three hundredth smudged version of a male torso when Corbin’s fingers stopped my scribbling.
“You okay, Twinkle?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just a little preoccupied with my project,” I told him, not wanting him worried.
Kayla made her way toward us, and Enzo’s eyebrows furrowed as if he wanted to commit murder. I followed the path of his gaze.
“Kayla, your foot is bleeding,” I told her, tossing my sketchbook aside and climbing to my feet. She just waved off the concern before holding her palm out to stop me.
She bent and picked up her towel from next to me and then, lifting up, she gave us all a scintillating smile, which contrasted with the situation so badly it made my skin crawl a little bit.
“I’m fine, probably just a broken nail. We get so used to the pain that we don’t notice it anymore,” she explained, but I saw how she didn’t put much pressure on her bleeding foot as she high-tailed it out of there. Just as she was leaving, Oscar was walking in, beaming a smile as he closed the distance to me and pulled me into a hug.
“Guess what, Dellie?” he said. “We ate lunch with your friend Dalton today, and he totally came up with a name for our band.”
“I thought you weren’t a band,” I teased, and my brother and my boyfriend both talked over me with a burst of energy in their tone. “Woke!”
“Woke?” I blinked.
“Woke, as in always here, always present,” Corbin clarified.
“I’m not sure that’s the meaning, you guys,” I said, a bit concerned.
“Woke AF!” Oscar exclaimed, and he was shushed by about five people on the floor.
“Whatever, let’s go. It’s the last garage day for Woke,” he said and grabbed my hand, leading the way.
I made it so we stayed behind everyone else and whispered into his ear.
“Why are you acting so weird? Did I do anything wrong? Why aren’t you letting me in?”
I watched that small muscle in his jaw ticking again,
a shadow crossing his beautiful features.
“I promise that we’ll talk tonight after the show.”
“Good. Then, maybe we’ll talk about everything else while we’re at it.”
I had the thread between my fingers. I intended to start pulling. Oscar stopped us for a beat.
“Everything?”
“Everything. Why you lied about not playing piano, why you abandoned our letters, why you never agreed to call or meet again. I feel like I can’t move forward if I don’t know. I feel like we welcomed each other back into our lives but we forgot to clear the past.”
His feet were apparently very interesting, because he no longer looked me in the eyes.
“Okay, Dellie. I promise. Everything.”
***
Micky might have said it was just like a garage kind of performance, but the atmosphere was more like a concert. People screamed, hollered, encouraged, clapped, and held their phones up high to record the songs the boys were testing. I was nervous for them.
But they looked cool in control on the stage. Well, most of them did. Enzo had been at our table a few moments before everything started and there was blood on his knuckles like he’d put a fist through the wall. He’d chatted me up about the weather, all the while looking at Kayla like a hawk. She never spared him her almond eyes, which almost made me feel sorry him.
They had opened with a song Corbin had co-written with Enzo the year before, but they followed that with a handful of cover songs. It was about an hour after everything had started when the music stopped and my brother pulled the mic from the stand.
“We have another original song we want to introduce now, this one will be interpreted exclusively by our piano master.” He held a hand out toward Oscar, who turned to look for me in the crowd. When he found me, he winked and touched his fingers to the keys at the same time, filling the silent room with a stunning melody. His beautiful voice followed soon.
I wonder what goes through your mind
When someone mentions my name to you
Ws you’re everything want in life
But I don’t really know what I mean to you.
Since we met, I’ve been living in a dream world
Which I don’t want to ever wake up from.
